The alleged offences in the Michael Chopra corruption case took place in races on the all-weather. Photograph: Julian Herbert/Action Images

For a six-year-old bay gelding with just half a dozen wins to his name, It's A Mans World has appeared in a surprising number of news stories over the course of his 42-race career.

He featured in the case against Maurice Sines, James Crickmore and others in December 2011 which resulted in bans totalling nearly 67 years being handed down to the 11 individuals involved, although the jockey Kirsty Milczarek subsequently had her two-year suspension overturned. And now here he is again, as one of the nine horses in the case against nine people, including Andrew Heffernan, a jockey now riding in Australia, and two Championship football players, Michael Chopra and James Coppinger.

This is, it seems, a complete coincidence. It's A Mans World was the 11-8 favourite when he was laid to lose a race at Lingfield in January 2009 by associates of Sines and Crickmore, and the 4-1 favourite for the race at Southwell in March 2011 which features in the latest case. But it may say something about the strength and depth of competition in all-weather racing, or the lack of it, that the same name has cropped up in two major investigations into alleged corruption and race-fixing, in races which were 26 months apart.

The all-weather circuit, which will get fully into its stride in a month or so, has frequently come to racing's rescue during several bitter winters in recent years. Nor is it simply a stop-gap for the annual whiteouts. The 2013 fixture list, published this week, includes 307 meetings on all-weather tracks, which is nearly 35% of all the Flat racing scheduled for next year.

But the number of corruption cases which have involved races on the all-weather, particularly during the winter months, is significant, and it is not difficult to imagine why a potential cheat might see these races as a soft touch.

The prize money is low, often only a fraction of the amount that is turned over on the same race on the Betfair betting exchange alone, and many of the horses are both slow and inconsistent.

The overall level of competition is often poor too, which means that bad horses are chasing bad money at short prices. In the era of the betting exchanges – which means, to all intents and purposes, Betfair – it could be possible to win more by losing a race than by coming home in front. Slow horse loses bad race – it happens all the time anyway. And if the attention of much of the racing world is on National Hunt racing in the months leading up to the Cheltenham Festival in March, so much the better.

That, at least, is the theory. But the message that the British Horseracing Authority will hope to convey if those charged as a result of its latest investigation are found to be in breach of the rules of racing is that even if the attention of many punters is elsewhere, that of the BHA's compliance officers is certainly not.

Looking in on the exchange's markets from outside, even minor races such as the nine which feature in this latest case can seem to be a blizzard of numbers and cash. As the off-time approaches, the trading becomes ever more frantic, and the figure at the top of the page which shows the total amount matched on the race jumps by hundreds or even thousands every few seconds. No human eye could ever hope to pick a pattern from the stream of money, prices and trades.

But the human eye does not need to, because there are software programs to do it instead. It would be normal practice for anyone planning to exploit inside information for gain to spread the money around between several different Betfair accounts, but if the same accounts are consistently laying exactly the same horses, and doing so with what appears to be a golden touch, then Betfair's internal auditing software will pick it up, and probably sooner rather than later.

It might just be an odd coincidence, of course, like It's A Mans World's appearance in yet another set of races linked to a corruption investigation, and this case has reached only the stage of charges being laid.

Those named on Thursday will have the chance to clear their names at the hearing at a date to be decided, and they may well defend themselves both vigorously and successfully.

But as the stalwarts of the winter all-weather circuit prepare for another four months of regular toil at Lingfield, Southwell, Kempton and Wolverhampton, the BHA will hope that the message of the latest set of charges will be as positive as possible.

Not, in other words, that the all-weather is a messy sandpit of intrigue and skulduggery, but that the Authority is doing all it can to ensure that any would-be corruptors of the sport are found and exposed.